After the ceremony marking its founding,
a city began to live, and vast urban projects began to mingle with the immediate
problems of daily life. There was a mission to be accomplished, but first it
was necessary to survive the enemies, hunger, disease. As in all crises, the
uneasy link between ideology and concrete reality was put to the test. At times,
the founding group increased in number, at others it decreased. Physical space
began to fill with a few buildings that gave the city a certain semblance of
reality; basic needs began to be satisfied in rudimentary but methodical ways;
government began to function; Indian attacks began to be checked. Still, the
founders had to decide what to do with the city, what function it should serve.

It was easy to transpose the lines on the
blueprint onto the actual land; it was not so easy to turn ideology into policy.
Each city had been set up according to some general premises and in response
to some concrete circumstances. But the very fact of setting it up had created
a host of new problems, both practical and ideological, that were solved at
times very deliberately, at times in rather intuitive or spontaneous ways. Decisions
were usually made under the weight of many things: a vague remembrance of the
original purpose of the founders; the unique profile each urban society was
acquiring, as it took shape, generation after generation; the possibilities
that had been foreseen for its development. But the crucial element was perhaps
the gradual discovery of all the new, concrete opportunities that the city and
the region had to offer. Many were indeed very promising, but they required
a change in attitude. For these new urban societies took little time to realize
that they had a choice between two systems: that of their somewhat marginal
homelands, grounded on an inflexible conception of colonial empire, and that
of mercantile Europe, with its wide range of temptations, which they had been
able to glimpse at through the narrow chink opened by corsairs, pirates, and
smugglers.

It was the appearance of pirates and corsairs,
coupled with the repeated threat of Indian insurrections, that helped maintain
the military character of some cities. The conquest had been accomplished at
large, but locally the danger of an Indian uprising still threatened many cities
and forced their residents to stand ready for war, no matter how certain they
might be of their final victory. More serious was the problem posed by the corsairs
and pirates who roamed the high seas in search of opportunities to plunder galleons
or to attack and loot cities. The fort-city improved its military structure,
received experienced garrisons and consolidated its defenses with major works
of military engineering that reached their peak in the eighteenth century, when
walls were added to the fortified castles and fortresses to protect the civilian
population. But not even the fort-city was confined to this one function; urban
life discovered new opportunities and created some on its own, and even the
experienced captain, perhaps a hero from the wars in Italy and Flanders, would
slip surreptitiously into lawful trade or smuggling, hiding behind the servants
and the clientele that his rank afforded him. As activities became more numerous
and diverse, the fort-city itself became simply a city.

The cities had a well-knitted political,
administrative, and ecclesiastical structure that helped to develop other aspects
of urban life. Yet colonial government was remarkably cumbersome for more than
one reason: the homelands were extremely far away; they had developed a rather
peculiar and elaborate bureaucracy; day after day the central government was
plagued by the number and complexity of the problems arousing in every corner
of the colonial world; officials wielded an odd kind of power, because their
actions were constantly monitored by other officials and no one knew, from moment
to moment, who was in the crowns favor. Heaps of paper came and went amidst
endless scheming and intrigue, and a world of characters of diverse station
and appearance hovered around the Viceroys, captains general, judges, bishops,
and magistrates. It was this game of favor and intrigue that distinguished the
great capitalsMexico City, Lima, Salvador de Bahiafrom the other
smaller and more provincial ones, like Bogota, Havana, Santiago, São Paulo,
or Buenos Aires. But all of them, big and small, were centers of power and therefore
stood apart from the cities that only had to deal with municipal issues and
with the concerns of the wealthy owners in their region. The capitals were not
simply centers of power but also hubs of cultural activity, or better still,
centers where ideas were shaped, some of them trivial perhaps, others significant
for the life of the city. In the capitals were the archbishops and bishops,
who concerned themselves with the work of conversion, and the Inquisition, that
watched zealously over orthodox faith; and also the preachers who guarded public
morality as they administered the sacraments; and the priests who pleaded for
mercy for the Indians and for black slaves; and the brainy theologians, and
the erudite professors who educated the sons of noblemen in colleges and universities,
as well as those who trained the sons of Indian chieftains. All this activity,
very limited at the beginning, increased rapidly in the capital cities, both
large and small. But with time, some of its forms began to appear even in the
provincial cities.

What did grow was economic activity. Like
the fort-city, the emporium cityport and marketplace all at oncediversified
its activities, serving at times as a military garrison, at times as a seat
of government or a center of learning. But unlike the fort-city, where the first
function was gradually overtaken by other activities, the emporium city became
more of an emporium as time went on, with the exception of a few isolated cases
of actual decline, such as Santo Domingo; and new emporium cities emerged during
the first centuries of the colonial period. The entire system of production,
both in agriculture and in mining, grew and got organized around the city. But
what grew, above all, was brokerage, because production was invariably funneled
through the city. The volume of exports also increased, and with it the activity
of port and harbor; trade expanded its network as a result of the increase in
exports and in Spanish imports and smuggled goods carried through long trade
routes. Domestic markets also grew, embodied in each local marketplace: that
of Mexico or Cuzco, that of Recife or Santiago, some of them direct descendants
of the Indian tianguis1but
in no way different from the one on the Zocodover in Toledo. A vast concentration
of consumer goods for the city and its surrounding areas was to be found there,
in the open marketa colorful scene bustling with local customers, ready
to buy, and with craftsmen and rural producers, ready to sell. What was not
sold in the marketplace was sold in the poky little shops squeezed together
on the city square, near the gallows and the welllike the cajones de2 on the Main square in Lima, or the cajones
de San Jose in Mexico Cityor in the more suitable shops along
the major streets.

Busy urban networks kept up a flow of products
tailored to suit the needs of different types of consumer. As business diversified,
a financial network was also organized by money-lenders and profiteers next
to the large trading companies who had enough economic power to engage exclusively
in wholesale business but would never refuse a minor transaction, if their line
of business should allow. This process gave shape to the different economic
groups that, in the end, would hold the fate of the city in their hands.

As these diverse activities continued to
develop, the older cities began to lose their primitive appearance and ceased
to be the rustic villages they had once been. In order to fit their concrete
circumstances, the cities also altered the pre-established functions that their
founders had assigned to them: some functions were maintained, some were abandoned,
some still were combined with new ones and, on occasion, were entirely replaced
by them. It was a long, complex, at times even confusing, process of change
that began when the cities were founded and lasted until the second half of
the eighteenth century. In the world in which they were established, these cities
were destined to beas they ultimately becamebourgeois and mercantile
centers. But for a long time they were constrained by the vision of their founders
to remain on the margins of the mercantile world. Thus, against the grain, they
grew as cities of hidalgos, because hidalgos wanted to be the
groups that became dominant within them. And hidalgos they remained,
as long as they could, concealing the fact that they were only too ready to
give in to the temptations of the bourgeoisie.